Preface

by J.D. Hunley

Hermann Noordung's Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums,
published here in English translation, was one of the classic
writings about spaceflight. Its author, whose real name was Herman
Potocnik, was an obscure former captain in the Austrian army who
became an engineer. He was born on 22 December 1892 in Pola (later,
Pula), the chief Austro-Hungarian naval station, located on the
Adriatic in what is today Croatia. As the location might suggest
in part, his father served in the navy as a staff medical officer.
The name Potocnik is Slovenian, also the nationality of Herman's
mother, who had some Czech ancestors as well. The young man was
educated in various places in the Habsburg monarchy, attending
an elementary school in Marburg (later, Maribor) in what is today
Slovenia. He enrolled in military schools with emphases on science
and mathematics as well as languages for his intermediate and
secondary schooling, in the obscure town of Fischau, Lower Austria,
and in Mährisch-Weißkirchen (later the Czech city of
Hranice), respectively.

Following that, he attended the technical military academy in
Mödling southwest of Vienna. Upon graduation, he received
his commission as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army, where
he served during World War I in a railroad (guard) regiment. From
1918 to 1922 he studied electrical engineering at the Technical
Institute in Vienna, although tuberculosis had forced him to leave
the army in 1919. While he appears to have set up a practice as
an engineer, his illness evidently prevented him from working
in that capacity. But he did become interested in the spaceflight
movement. He contributed monetarily to the journal of the German
Society for Space Travel (Verein für Raumschiffahrt or VfR),
Die Rakete (The Rocket), begun in 1927, and he corresponded
with Hermann Oberth (1894-1989), whose book Die Rakete zu den
Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space,
published in 1923) essentially launched the spaceflight movement
in Germany and laid the theoretical foundations for future space
efforts there. Another correspondent was Baron Guido von Pirquet
(1880-1966), who wrote a series of articles on interplanetary
travel routes in Die Rakete during 1928 that suggested
space stations as depots for supplying fuel and other necessaries
to interplanetary rockets. The rockets, in his conception, would
be launched from the stations rather than from the Earth to avoid
the amounts of propellants required for escape from the home
planet's
gravitational field, which would be much weaker at the distance
of a few hundred kilometers.

Oberth encouraged Potocnik to express his ideas about rocketry
and space travel in a book, which he completed with its 100
illustrations
in 1928. Potocnik's gratitude to Oberth and the enthusiasts around
him in Germany led the still young but ailing engineer to assume
the pen name of Noordung (referring to the German word for north,
Nord) in honor of the fellow space enthusiasts to his north.
He published the book with Richard Carl Schmidt & Co. in Berlin
in 1929, only to die soon afterwards on 27 August 1929 of
tuberculosis.
(1)

Potocnik's book dealt, as its title suggests, with a broad range
of topics relating to space travel, although the rocket motor
that forms the book's subtitle was not especially prominent among
them. What makes the book important in the early literature about
space travel is its extensive treatment of the engineering aspects
of a space station. Potocnik was hardly the first person to write
about this subject, as the comment about Pirquet above would
suggest.
The idea in fictional form dates back to 1869-1870 when American
minister and writer Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) published
"The Brick Moon" serially in The Atlantic Monthly.
The German mathematics teacher, philosopher, and historian of
science Kurd Laßwitz (1848-1910) followed this up in 1897
with his novel Auf zwei Planeten (on two planets), which
featured a Martian space station supported by antigravity that
served as a staging point for space travel. (2) Two years before
the appearance of Laßwitz's book, the earliest of the
recognized
pioneers of spaceflight theory, the Russian school teacher
Konstantin
E. Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), published a work of science fiction
entitled (in English translation) Reflections on Earth and
Heaven and the Effects of Universal Gravitation (1895) in
which he discussed asteroids and artificial satellites as bases
for rocket launches. He also discussed the creation of artificial
gravity on the man-made space stations through rotation. (3) Unlike
Laßwitz, Tsiolkovsky was not content with science fiction,
however. Between 1911 and 1926, the Russian spaceflight theorist
expanded his ideas and subjected them to mathematical calculation.
In the process, he elaborated a concept of a space station as
a base for voyages into space but did not develop it in any detail.
(4) Others in what was then the Soviet Union also developed ideas
about space stations, (5) but they were little known in the West.
Thus, for the development there of conceptions about space stations
the writings of Oberth were much more important. The
Romanian-German
spaceflight theorist wrote briefly about "observation
stations"
in his 1923 book and discussed some of their possible uses such
as observation and military reconnaissance of the Earth, service
as a fueling station, and the like. (6) In the expanded and more
popular version of his book published in 1929, Wege zur
Raumschiffahrt
(translated as Ways to Spaceflight), Oberth covered these
ideas in more detail, but he devoted most of his attention to
a space mirror that could reflect solar energy upon a single point
on Earth or upon a wider region for keeping northern ports free
of ice in winter, illuminating large cities at night, and other
applications. (7)

Oberth's expanded book appeared, according to Frank H. Winter,
immediately after that of Potocnik. (8) Winter does not reveal
his source for this information, but its accuracy appears to be
validated by the numerous references to Noordung in Ways to
Spaceflight. (9) On the other hand, since a review of
Potocnik's
book appeared in the October 1928 issue of Die Rakete,
it is possible that Oberth saw an advance copy. (10) While these
other early works on space stations had important theoretical
influences, what Potocnik's book offered that they didn't was
engineering details about how a space station might be constructed.
(11)

While Potocnik's book is clearly the classic statement of how
a space station might be constructed, (12) it is difficult to
know how to assess its real importance for the later design,
construction,
and use of space stations and other spacecraft. For one thing,
the work received considerable criticism, apparently even before
it was published. (13) The unsigned October 1928 review in Die
Rakete praised the book as a successful and understandable
introduction to the highly interesting problem of spaceflight.
But it said the work paid too little attention to recent
contributions
to the topic, such as those that had appeared in Die Rakete
itself. The author's treatment of the issue of [rocket] efficiency
could be accepted only with caution, the review went on. Noordung
presented a detailed treatment of a space station, but he placed
it in a 35,000 kilometer, geostationary orbit, which was not
practical
according to the existing state of research (see below). (14)

As can be seen from the translation that follows (pp. 108-110),
in fact Potocnik spoke of a 35,900 kilometer orbit but also
discussed
the possibilities of orbits at different distances from the Earth
and at other inclinations than the plane of the equator. Thus,
this particular criticism was a bit unfair.

Both Willy Ley and Pirquet also criticized the book shortly after
it appeared. (15) Their arguments appear to have been conveniently
summarized by Ley in his widely-circulated Rockets, Missiles,
and Space Travel, which had appeared under a variety of titles
and revisions and some twenty printings from 1944 to 1968. (16)
In the 1961 revised and enlarged edition of that book Ley recalled
that Potocnik had "succeeded in getting himself into the
bad graces of the few rocket men of the time by a number of
peculiarities.
The first of them . . . was a somewhat fantastic method of
calculating
the over-all efficiency of a rocket." This particularly
"incensed"
Pirquet, Ley said. Secondly, he failed to answer
correspondence--naturally
enough since he was dying of tuberculosis--but most of his
contemporaries
were evidently ignorant of that fact. The third peculiarity was
his insistence

that the space station must be in a 24-hour orbit, something that
would decrease its value by, say, 75 per cent. In such an orbit
it could observe only one hemisphere of the earth and that one
not very well because of the great distance, which also would
make the station's construction and maintenance rather expensive
in terms of extra tons of fuel consumed [on the trip to the
station].
He did have a number of interesting ideas, but each one of them
came out somewhat flawed.

Ley went on to note several "essentially correct"
thoughts
in Potocnik's design, including an airlock and the plan to obtain
power from the sun. But he said there were also "strange
mistakes," such as an excessive concern with heating the
station when what it really needed was air conditioning because
of the absorbed heat from the sun, the heat from the bodies of
the crew, and that generated by electric motors. Also, Potocnik
wanted to rotate his living wheel--the inhabited element among
the three connected but separate units in his space station--every
eight seconds so as to create a full g of artificial gravity.
Ley said that 1/3 g would be adequate and would allow the station
to be "lighter and therefore cheaper to carry into an orbit
piecemeal." (18)

Besides such criticisms, which must have served to reduce the
influence of Potocnik's detailed designs, there was also the
problem
that the book appears not to have been widely available to the
non-German speaking world. There was a very early, partial English
translation by Francis M. Currier that appeared serially in what
might seem (although it really is not) a strange place, Hugo
Gernsback's
Science Wonder Stories in mid-1929, (19) but it is uncertain
how many people might have read the work in that magazine.
Moreover,
even if they did read it, how many of them kept their copies and
how available the partial translation was in most libraries are
questions no one seems to have asked. (20) There was also a
(partial?)
translation done for the British Interplanetary Society and kept
at its library in London, apparently as an unpublished typescript.
(21) And a Russian translation appeared about 1935 but may have
been only partial since it was only 92 pages long compared with
the 188 in the original German edition. (22) Despite these
translations,
at least in Britain the work appears not to have been readily
available. For example, the famous British science fiction writer
and member of the British Interplanetary Society Arthur C. Clarke
had cited Potocnik's book in his October 1945 article in
Wireless
World where he had discussed using a satellite in
geosynchronous
orbit for purposes of radio communications. (23) But he later
stated that at the time he had not seen the book, only pictures
of Potocnik's space station in science fiction magazines. He only
obtained his "first copy of Potocnik's classic book"
in 1993. And while some Austrians have tried to credit Potocnik
with first conceiving of both the communications satellite and
a geostationary orbit for it, Clarke pointed out that Tsiolkovsky
had written about the geostationary orbit at the beginning of
the century and that Oberth first wrote about using space stations
for communications in his 1923 book, although through optical
means rather than radio. Clarke nevertheless credited Potocnik
with envisioning the use of short waves for communications between
the Earth and his space station. (24)

Evidently, Clarke was not aware of the translation in the British
Interplanetary Society's library. Other members of the society
apparently were not either, because a brief notice appeared in
its publication, Spaceflight, in 1985 announcing that the
editors had "at last" secured a copy of the Potocnik
book in the original German. "This was a book to which the
pre-war BIS Technical Committee frequently referred," the
notice went on, "though none had actually seen it, for the
simple reason that no copies were available." (25)

Both Frank Winter and Adam Gruen have suggested that Potocnik's
book formed the basis for a plotless short story entitled
"Lunetta"
that Wernher von Braun wrote in 1929, describing a trip to a space
station. (26) If correct, this hypothesis would suggest an
important
link in the evolution about ideas for a space station. As is well
known, von Braun--technical director of the German Army
Experimental
Station at Peenemünde that developed the V-2 ballistic missile
during World War II and later director of NASA's Marshall Space
Flight Center while it developed the Saturn V rocket--wrote an
article for the popular Collier's magazine in 1952 in which
he described a space station at least superficially similar to
Potocnik's. (27) This article, others in the eight-part
Collier's
series of which it was a part, and a Walt Disney television series,
Man in Space, in which von Braun, Ley, and others appeared,
helped establish the American popular image of a space station
and of space exploration as well as a vision of a space station
that, in Howard McCurdy's words, "would continue to guide
NASA strategy through the decades ahead." (28) As McCurdy
also stated, "More than any other person, von Braun would
be responsible for clarifying in the American mind the relationship
between space stations and space exploration." (29)

Thus, if Potocnik indeed influenced von Braun, through the latter
he must also have influenced the United States and NASA.
Unfortunately,
there appears to be no conclusive evidence for such influence
on Potocnik's part. Winter quotes von Braun as saying that during
the period around 1929 he "read everything in the space field,
including Willy Ley's popularizations," (30) and it seems
likely that he would have read the Potocnik book along with the
other contemporary literature. As stated above, von Braun wrote
"Lunetta" in 1929, so it could easily have been
influenced
by Potocnik. At the time the future rocket engineer and manager
was still attending secondary school at the Hermann Lietz
International
School on the island of Spiekeroog in the North Sea. The school
published the plotless story in its publication, Leben und
Arbeit (life and work) in the 1930-1931 issue, volume 2-3
on pp. 88-92. (31) It describes a trip by rocket to a space station
and back, with some of the details similar to those in Potocnik's
book, which does contain a description of a somewhat similar trip
(pp. 170-174 of the translation). (32) However, Oberth had also
included a description of a rocket flight through interplanetary
space in Ways to Spaceflight, upon which von Braun could
have loosely based his own story. (33) Thus, the influence of
Potocnik's book upon von Braun remains probable but speculative.

What can be stated unequivocally is that Potocnik's book was widely
known even to people who may have seen only photographs or sections
from the book in translation. For example, Harry E. Ross of the
British Interplanetary Society proposed a large, rotating space
station in conjunction with Ralph A. Smith in 1948-1949, basing
it upon Potocnik's drawings although neither of them could read
his German. (34) It is also clear that although the details of
Potocnik's designs for a space station were not repeated in later
space stations, he foresaw many of the purposes for which space
stations as well as other spacecraft were used. As the reader
of the translation will discover, Potocnik, following Oberth on
many points, predicted a great many uses for his space station.
These included physical and chemical experiments conducted in
the absence of gravity and heat, studies of cosmic rays,
astronomical
studies without the interference produced by the Earth's
atmosphere,
studies of the planet Earth itself from the vantage point of space
(including meteorological and military applications of the
resulting
information), the use of a space mirror to focus the rays of the
sun upon the Earth for a variety of purposes (including combat),
and use as a base for traveling further into space (pp. 174-92).

Not all of these goals have been implemented. But on Skylab, which
provided an orbiting habitat for three 3-person crews between
May 1973 and February 1974, experiments included various solar
studies, stellar astronomy, space physics, experiments to study
the Earth, materials science, zero-gravity studies, and studies
of radiation, among others. (35) Numerous other spacecraft from
the Hubble Space Telescope to Shuttle orbiters equipped with a
spacelab have also fulfilled some of the expectations set forth
in a general way by Potocnik. (36)

It is also quite possible that by proposing the first actual design
for a space station and by offering illustrations of that design,
Potocnik helped to fixate the imagination of people interested
in spaceflight upon a space station as an important goal in itself
and means to the end of interplanetary flight. Since 1959 NASA
has conducted at least a hundred studies of space station designs,
(37) and the idea of a space station became a firm fixture in
NASA's planning from the mid-1960s to the present day. (38) Much
more continuously than the United States, the former Soviet Union
and Russia have had a space station program dating back to the
launch of Salyut 1 on April 19, 1971. (39) In view of the mid-1930s
translation of Potocnik's book into Russian, perhaps that program,
too, owes something to the little-known Austro-Hungarian engineer's
study.

In view of these possibilities, it is time for Potocnik's book
to be readily available to the English-speaking world in a readable
and accurate translation. At the suggestion of Lee Saegesser,
the NASA History Office commissioned the translation that appeared
as NASA TT-10002 in 1993. The NASA STI Program had that translation
done by SCITRAN of Santa Barbara, California, and subsequently
edited by Jennifer Garland of the STI Program. She made numerous
corrections to grammar, spelling, formatting, and vocabulary.
She also ensured that all figures and equations were included,
keyed, and oriented accurately. I offered a few preliminary
corrections
that appeared in the original translation, such as the rendition
of the word Kunstsatz in a fireworks rocket as
"bursting
charge" rather than "man-made charge" and of
Stab on the same rocket as "guide stick" rather
than "brace." I have since gone through the translated
text more extensively and compared it with the original German.
In the process, I have made numerous other changes to the original
translation. For example, SCITRAN consistently translated the
word Betriebsstoff as fuel when in many instances it clearly
refers to both a fuel and an oxidizer. Hence, according to usage,
I have sometimes rendered it as "propellant" and in
other instances left it as "fuel" where that translation
seems appropriate. Similarly, where appropriate I have changed
the translation of Gestirn from "star" to
"heavenly
body" or "planet" where the word clearly referred
to something other than a fixed star. In general, I have tried
to ensure that the translation followed American colloquial usage
without deviating from the sense of the original German. I have
added a number of asterisked footnotes to the text, largely to
identify people Potocnik mentioned.

Following my editing, Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger kindly agreed to read
the translation. Dr. Stuhlinger, who earned his Ph.D. in physics
at the University of Tübingen in 1936 and whose involvement
in rocketry and space work began at Peenemünde in 1943 and
extended through service as associate director of science at the
NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center through the end of 1975, has
a much more intimate knowledge of the technological details about
which Potocnik wrote than I do as well as a more subtle grasp
of the nuances of Potocnik's Austrian German. He has painstakingly
read through the original German and made numerous corrections
to the translation that I missed. For example, the translators
had rendered fortgeschleudert (literally, "flung
away")
as "accelerated away," whereas Dr. Stuhlinger improved
that to the more colloquial and accurate "launched."
Similarly, he changed the translation of Schwerpunkt from
the correct dictionary meaning "center of mass" to the
more exact "center of gravity." And where the translation
rendered liegender in reference to a position of the human
body as "lying," he changed that to the much more
appropriate
English word, "prone." In these and countless other
ways, he made the translation both more accurate and more readable
without altogether effacing the style of someone writing in
Austrian
German at a date well before many of today's technical terms had
been coined.

As Dr. Stuhlinger wrote to me on 2 August 1994 after he had
finished
his final editing, "Noordung's way of writing is in his
lovable
and homely Austrian style, with many small words that do not
contribute
much to the content of a sentence, but rather to an easy flow
of the language. Many of these little words," Stuhlinger
went on, "can have a multitude of meanings, depending on
the context; in looking up these words in the dictionary,"
it is easy to choose a wrong translation and thus change a
sentence's
meaning. "In numerous cases, I just struck out such words,
because they are not really needed, and only burden the text;
in other cases, I had to select another English translation."
Despite such problems with translating the book, however, and
despite "some basically incorrect views expressed by the
author," Stuhlinger added "it is a remarkable book"
that he thought should be made accessible to an audience not able
to read it in the original Austrian German.

In my own editing and in writing this introduction, I have
benefited
from the advice and assistance of a number of people. In listing
them, I run the risk of forgetting some whose help I neglected
to annotate in my notes, but the list should certainly include
John Mulcahey, Jesco von Puttkamer, Otto Guess, Lee Saegesser,
Shirley Campos, Beverly S. Lehrer, Jennifer Hopkins, Bill Skerrett,
Adam Gruen, Timothy Cronen, Michael J. Neufeld, Howard E. McCurdy,
and Roger D. Launius. Fred Ordway deserves special mention not
only for writing the foreword but for sharing materials for an
earlier translation he had planned in conjunction with Harry O.
Ruppe, Willy Ley and others. In addition to doing the initial
editing of TT-10002, Jennifer Garland worked with me closely in
arranging for the translation, and I would like to thank her for
being exceptionally cooperative and professional in that effort.
Above all, however, Dr. Stuhlinger deserves credit for making
the translation much more accurate than it would have been without
his careful editing. With very minor changes, I have accepted
his corrections of the text, but I alone retain responsibility
for any errors that remain in the translation.

__________________________

(1) Frank H. Winter, "Observatories in Space, 1920s
Style,"
Griffith Observer 46 (Jun. 1982): 3-5; Fritz Sykora,
"Pioniere
der Raketentechnik aus Österreich," Blätter
für Technikgeschichte 22 (1960): 189-192, 196-199; Ron
Miller, "Herman Potocnik--alias Hermann Noordung,"
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 45 (1992):
295-296; Harry O. Ruppe, "Noordung: Der Mann und sein
Werk,"
Astronautik 13 (1976): 81-83; Herbert J. Pichler,
"Hermann
Potocnik-Noordung, 22. Dez. 1892-27 Aug. 1929," typescript
from a folder on Potocnik in the National Air and Space Museum's
Archives. These sources on Potocnik's life agree in the essentials
but disagree in some particulars, even to the spelling of his
first name, which appears as Herman (with one n) on the title
page of the Slovenian edition of his book, first published in
his native language in 1986. Winter and Sykora also discuss both
Oberth and Pirquet. Further information about both appears in
Barton C. Hacker, "The Idea of Rendezvous: From Space Station
to Orbital Operations in Space-Travel Thought," Technology
and Culture 15 (1974): 380-384. Other sources on Oberth's
life include Hans Barth, Hermann Oberth: "Vater der
Raumfahrt"
(Munich: Bechtle, 1991) and John Elder, "The Experience of
Hermann Oberth," as yet unpublished paper given at the 42nd
Congress of the International Astronautics Federation, October
5-11, 1991, Montreal, Canada. On Pirquet's series of articles,
see also Die Rakete: Offizielles Organ des Vereins für
Raumschiffahrt E.V. in Deutschland 2 (1928): esp. 118, 137-140,
184, 189.

(11) Sykora, "Pioniere der Raketentechnik," p. 198;
Frank Winter, Rockets into Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1990), pp. 25-26. In fact, Winter states,
"his
work was so comprehensive that no other space station study
appeared
until the mid-1940s."

(12) Cf. Winter, "Observatories in Space," p. 4.

(13) Willy Ley (Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space [New
York: Viking, 1968], p. 540) and others have dated Potocnik's
book from 1928, but as Harry Ruppe points out
("Noordung,"
p. 82n) the 1929 edition of the book gives no indication that
it is a second printing. Moreover, the copyright dates from 1929.

(14) Die Rakete 2 (Oct. 1928): 158-159.

(15) Ruppe, "Noordung," p. 82.

(16) As stated on the back of the title page of the 1968 edition,
Rockets, Missiles, and Men of Space, which had a less
extensive
discussion of the author and book than the 1961 edition referred
to in the narrative above and cited in the next footnote.
Interestingly,
the 1951 edition, also entitled Rockets, Missiles, and Space
Travel (like the 1961 edition), relegated Potocnik and the
discussion of his book to a footnote, where none of the criticism
appeared.

(19) Science Wonder Stories 1 (1929): 170-80, 264-72,
and 361-68 (July-September issues). Photocopies in the National
Air and Space Museum's archives in a folder on Potocnik; copies
of the original magazine at the Library of Congress. Science
Wonder Stories is not as strange a place for a translation
of an engineering study to appear as the title might suggest.
Gernsback (1884-1967) carried on the masthead of the new magazine
the dictum, "Prophetic Fiction is the Mother of Scientific
Fact," and it was his policy to publish only stories that
were scientifically correct, with a "basis in scientific
laws as we know them. . . ." He also carried a section
entitled
"Science News of the Month," in which the publication
sought to report up-to-date scientific achievements "in plain
English." Copy of editorial page from Science Wonder
Stories
1 (1929) in Hugo Gernsback, biographical file, NASA Historical
Reference Collection. See also Tom D. Crouch, "'To Fly to
the World in the Moon': Cosmic Voyaging in Fact and Fiction from
Lucian to Sputnik," in Science Fiction and Space Futures,
Past and Present, ed. Eugene M. Emme, AAS History Series,
Vol. 5 (San Diego: Univelt, 1982), pp. 19-22, and Sam Moscowitz,
"The Growth of Science Fiction from 1900 to the Early
1950s,"
in Blueprints for Space: Science Fiction to Science Fact
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), pp. 69-82,
among other sources on Gernsback, who is generally credited with
coining the term "science fiction."

(20) As of March 17, 1994, the On-Line Computer Library Center
(OCLC) data base showed 8 libraries in the U.S. as holding hard
copies of the June 1929-May 1930 issues of Science Wonder
Stories
plus 14 others with those issues on microfilm. There may, of
course,
have been other libraries holding the set including the partial
Potocnik translation at earlier dates, but many of the current
holdings of microfilm especially seem to have been acquired
recently.
The Library of Congress Pre-1956 Imprints shows only 6
libraries holding Science Wonder Stories and its sequels,
for example, and Donald H. Tuck (The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction and Fantasy, 3 vols. [Chicago: Advent Publishers,
Inc., 1974-1982], vol. 1, p. 185) reports that all of Gernsback's
science fiction magazines "led checkered careers, some lasting
only brief periods." On the other hand, Fred Ordway reports
that he owns a fine set of Science Wonder Stories and that
many copies of such pulp magazines found their way to England
as ballast on ships returning less than full from carrying certain
types of cargo to the United States. Thus, there may be many copies
of the publication still in private hands.

(21) Hacker, "Idea of Rendezvous," p. 384n. Hacker seems
to suggest that this was a full translation, but according to
L. J. Carter, long-time executive secretary of the BIS, this was
not the case. In a letter to Fred Ordway on April 15, 1994, he
wrote in answer to Fred's question about the existence of such
a document, "yes, we used a translation of extracts from
it [the Potocnik book] when considering the early BIS Space Station
designs. This, however, was done before the war so it is unlikely
that anything has survived." Information kindly provided
by Fred Ordway.

(22) On-Line Computer Library Center printout from early March
1994 showing one copy in the United States at the California
Institute
of Technology.

(24) Clarke's comments appeared in a letter to the IEEE
Spectrum
31, (Mar. 1994): 4, responding to a letter from the Austrian,
Viktor Kudielka, in the same journal, vol. 30, (June 1993): 8,
where the latter claimed precedence for Potocnik in inventing
a geostationary orbit for short wave communications. (My thanks
to Lee Saegesser of the NASA History Office for bringing the Clarke
letter to my attention.) Pichler, "Potocnik-Noordung,"
pp. 2, 10, also claims precedence for Potocnik in inventing
communications
satellites and the geosynchronous orbit.

(28) Howard E. McCurdy, "The Possibility of Space Flight:
From Fantasy to Prophecy," paper delivered at the annual
meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, 15 Oct.
1993, pp. 2, 10-11, 16; The Space Station Decision: Incremental
Politics and Technological Choice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), pp. 5-8, quotation from p. 8. Cf. the
comment of W. Ray Hook, who had helped develop space station
concepts
at Langley Research Center and was later the manager of its Space
Station Office and then its Director for Space. In an apparently
unpublished paper entitled "Historical Review and Current
Plans," p. 1, received in late 1983 in the NASA History Office
and now residing in a folder marked "Space Station
Historical"
in the NASA Historical Reference Collection, he stated of von
Braun and others' space station concept published in
Collier's
in 1952, "The basic tenets and objectives of this proposal
were essentially sound and have been pursued with varying levels
of activity ever since." See also in this connection, Randy
Liebermann, "The Collier's and Disney Series,"
Blueprint for Space, pp. 135-146, and the video on the
subject at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

(34) Hacker, "Idea of Rendezvous," pp. 384-385; Frederick
I. Ordway, III, "The History, Evolution, and Benefits of
the Space Station Concept (in the United States and Western
Europe),"
paper presented at the XIIIe Congress of the History of Science,
Section 12, Moscow, August 1971, p. 6, later published in the
Actes du XIIIe Congrès International d'Histoire des
Sciences
12 (1974): 92-132. As Hacker points out, it was for Ross and Smith
that the BIS English translation was later prepared. The design
of their space station appeared in the London Daily Express
in November 1948 and later as "Orbital Bases" in the
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 8 (Jan. 1949):
1-19.

(35) W. David Compton and Charles D. Benson, Living and Working
in Space: A History of Skylab (Washington, D.C.: NASA SP-4208,
1983), esp. pp. 247-338, 381-386.

(36) See for example, The Aeronautics and Space Report of the
President, Fiscal Year 1992 Activities (Washington D.C.:
Government
Printing Office, 1993), pp. 11, 15-16.

(37) Sylvia D. Fries, "2001 to 1994: Political Environment
and the Design of NASA's Space Station System," Technology
and Culture 29 (1988): 571.

(38) See, e.g., the unpublished paper of Alex Roland, "The
Evolution of Civil Space Station Concepts in the United
States"
(May 1983), seen in his biographical file, NASA Historical
Reference
Collection.